Managing Third-Party funding Projects at German State Universities - a Theoretical Deduction of Design Principles for Implementing an IT-Artifact

While striving for excellence in science, funds for researchers are increasingly granted based on performance-oriented criteria. One of these criteria is the amount of third-party funds which motivates scientists to increasingly raise those funds. In addition to this, the performance-oriented granting of funds also leads to stagnating basic funds and financing difficulties at universities. Thus, scientists are also faced with the challenge of financing their research activities and for this purpose third-party funding provides a financing alternative. Consequently, the importance of third-party funding (TPF) rises. However, during the application phase of those third-party funding projects a large amount of data and documents is created. Because of the university structure, this situation results in various problems (e. g. heterogeneous storage, redundancies and inconsistencies). Due to increased importance of TPF, the amount of third-party funds rises and problems intensify while management activities in such projects are rarely supported by information technology. For addressing the mentioned problems, we develop an integrated IT-based third-party funding management system (TPFMS). We accomplish the implementation of the TPFMS by a prior deduction of design principles for implementing an IT-artifact using principal-agent and task closure theory.